1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to sales e-business tools in general, and, in more particular, a forecasting and revenue management e-business software tool that enables users to generate and view forecasts in an integrated environment.
2. Background Information
An important part of the work performed by many sales organizations concerns forecasting sales and revenue. An accurate forecast helps companies predict cash flows and product inventory, which drive many important business decisions, such as purchasing levels and schedules. Forecasts are also valuable for many other purposes, including obtaining capital resources, human resource needs, infrastructure needs, supplier forecasts, etc.
Currently, there are e-business application tools that assist in helping organizations forecast sales and revenues. However, these tools are limited, both in how they aggregate forecast data, how they enable revenue data to be defined and manipulated, and how the revenue data are displayed to users. Furthermore, these tools provided limited facilities for generating forecast information for various management levels in an organization. For example, forecast information for a national sales manager may comprise an aggregation of forecast data provided by all of the members of a sales team organization who are subordinate to the national sales manager, wherein the forecast information for each individual member of the team can be included in the manager's forecast when relevant or automatically summarized otherwise.